Turn Back the Time #fiction #addiction

I stood before the hands of the giant clock. They teased me as they clicked:

“you can go anywhere in your past

choose but choose fast

before the hand has gone one minute

you will either venture

or quit it.”

I was faced with a genie in a bottle decision. Where do I go? What do I revisit? Can I fix “it”?

In that 30 second time span I chose. “Take me to the year 1968 and the place Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco.”

There I was in a paisley maxi dress with my hair braided. It was me but it wasn’t me. I wasn’t the flower child. My mother was. If I could only save her from this moment where she wrecked her life, my life, my family…

“Can you tell me where Saxi is?” I tried to keep from inhaling the air . The secondary smoke would result in a nasty headache or a “high.”

“She just left with Brad.”

Brad was an innocuous name for a destroyer of life. This creep came into the suburbs to captivate young, attractive women.

“Saxi,” I called as I ran along Haight . I followed a couple of very lost in the clouds hippies. Her eyes barely acknowledged me. The spark that said, I love you sweetie-pie was extinguished.

“Please come home, Saxi.” I whsipered.

I had lived this moment so many times in my adult dreams. “Taxi” I whistled with all my might. I shouted this time holding out a Twenty which did the trick. Quickly I grabbed her arm pulling her into the car before she could think in her drugged oblivion.

“Take us to the train station.” I had no desire to have that creep follow us. We were leaving San Francisco and home for good.

****

The hands moved forward more gently as they shadowed Saxi’s wizened face. Her last, dying words “Thank you for rescuing me sweetie-pie.”

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The Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco was known in the 60s and 70s for it’s free love, free pot, free clinics. Long lines of tourists would motor through the district to see the strung-out hippies. I knew several teens who ran away to Haight. Even though their parents eventually got them “back”, they never came home. The heroin addiction in my baby-sitter rendered her an “on again off again “junkie for the remainder of her life.

This week’s writing prompt for Word Press Daily Post was Time Machine.

The photograph of the street sign is from the San Francisco China Times